Social Text issue

[Hartwin Alfred Gebhardt]

Tresy Kilbourne writes:

> >i have to say though, i appreciate the physicist's joke...I think he 
> >was less critiquing the philosophical position of relativism (which 
> >can & should be attacked philosophically, but on its own terms...) 
> >but instead critiquing the esotericism of academic writing, 
> >particularly in the lit crit field. 
> 
> I agree completely. It's about time someone on the left showed the reat 
> of the world we're not obscurantist jerkoff artists. The huffy response 
> of Mssrs. Ross and Fish remind me of the the asshole captain played by 
> Bruno Kirby in "Good Morning, Vietnam," whose pedantic attempts to 
> neutralize Adrian Kronauer's/Robin Williams' digs only redouble the 
> comedic effect. These guys really don't get it. And it's all the funnier, 
> coming from folks whose ostensible metier, as I always understood it, was 
> irony.

Maybe you misunderstood those folks' metier? Like Sokal seems to have 
misunderstood it. His effort at a parody is not much more than sloppy 
cross-disciplinarity. Sure, some pomo theoreticians are guilty of the same 
thing, yet what Sokal satirizes in the end is not philosophers doing 
bad philosophy or even philosophers doing bad science, but scientists 
doing bad philosophy - I wonder if this is what he intended?

hg
hag at iafrica.com